Heck Of A Guy

As you may recall, in the last episode, The Mystery Of The Spooksound, I awoke at 2 AM to this sound, emanating from my shower:

The Sound

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The sound of water running in a shower, of course, hardly merits the title of “mystery” – unless one factors in the information that the shower wasn’t running when I went to bed (alone, alas).

As this tale resumes, I am opening the shower door, half-expecting to find Janet Leigh on the other side.

It turns out, however, that Janet was not inside the shower. Instead, there was, in fact, nothing unusual in the shower – except the absence of running water.

I then realized that the sound could still be coming from running water that was flowing in far more damaging areas than my shower: between the walls, for example. This thought explains why I spent the next two hours with a flashlight, inspecting the basement, the second story above my bathroom, the adjacent bathroom, the exterior of the house, and every other space of the house into which I could peer.

One will note that this blog is named “Heck Of A Guy,” not “Heck Of A Handyman.” That is because the latter would be a blatant prevarication. This lacuna in my skill-set was especially prominent in my calculations at 4 AM. As far as I knew, there had been water running in a hidden pocket somewhere in my house for at least two hours, and the chances that I would soon find it on my own, after spending that much time in futile searches, seemed slim.

I may not know much about plumbing, but I do know one useful bit of information.

I know The Fixer’s home phone number.

The The Fixer Digression

Many of the folks mentioned in these postings have met The Fixer; they will have already appreciated the double meaning of The The Fixer Digression. The Fixer was part of the crew that built heckofahouse and has since been our handyman, working on new projects generated by my hyperactive sense of whimsy and providing maintenance. So, The Fixer is not infrequently on hand when I have visitors. And, to meet The Fixer is to digress.

The Fixer and the Duke of Derm have hashed out which citizens of Mid-Atlantic military towns they know in common. He and Lawanda, whose son also works in the construction industry, have had many a lively discussion about the bizarre and unjust employment practices of the various local builders. I believe he and Mr. Science debated the pros and cons of vacationing in a number of locales in the Northwest.

In the story at hand, however, the important facts about The Fixer are

1. He knows stuff. He knows, for example, all manner of useful information about plumbing, carpentry, and such. And, he knows a lot about this house in particular. That he also already knows my limitations in the field assuages any potential embarrassment on my part is no small matter at 4 AM.
2. He is willing to help when help is needed.

So, at approximately 4:03 AM, I’m chatting on the phone with The Fixer. After I finish my recitation of the problem as I see it (I did omit the Bates Motel-Janet Leigh references) and answer a few questions, The Fixer is puzzled, intrigued, and, most importantly, en route to the heckofahouse.

At this point, I am half-hopeful that The Fixer will, on arrival, perform some secret handyman ritual on the lines of tapping the wall lightly with his knuckles, pausing to stroke his chin and ponder, and then repeating the process at intervals of every five feet until he comes to the corner, at which time, he nods his head knowingly and announces, “It’s your water pump gasket; that Masterson 438RT pump you’ve got is a fine piece of equipment but those darn gaskets have a way of going bad this time of year if we get a lot of rain.” (This is the condensed version. The complete fantasy includes The Fixer refusing any compensation, acknowledging that he couldn’t have solved the problem without my help, and then constructing a temporary replacement for the defective gasket from chewing gum, baking powder, and melted rubber bands, which he seals in place with duct tape.)

The “half” in “half-hoping” derives from the conflict between my desire to have the problem go away and my fear that I have overlooked something obvious, leading to visions of The Fixer laconically observing, for example, “Say, Doc, do ya think this geyser shooting up from that water pipe with the pickaxe stuck in it has anything to do with that noise you heard?”

That didn’t happen. Nor did the noise, as I half-feared/half-hoped, disappear spontaneously before The Fixer showed up. In fact, he spent the next 90 minutes, after confirming that, indeed, the shower wasn’t running, repeating the same searches I had completed and some others that hadn’t occurred to me.

Exhausting the likely possibilities, The Fixer’s plan was to next remove a couple of tiles from the shower in order to drill a hole in the wall behind the tile so he could check that space to determine if water was collecting there.

As he cleared the shower of soap, washcloth, and such accoutrements to begin this task, the noise abruptly changed in tone and then ceased altogether.

[The Aha! Moment follows the break.]

The Aha!

The culprit is pictured below:

The Backstory

For my birthday, The Prodigal had gifted me with the deluxe, multiple-bladed, battery-operated Gillette Mach3 Power Nitro razor pictured above.

This razor’s gimmick is that it, for reasons that are still unclear to me, vibrates. It is engineered to vibrate, its vibratory prowess is touted in advertisements, and, indeed, I can testify that it vibrates. At the urging of The Prodigal, I had tentatively tried vibratory shaving with some trepidation only to discover that this feature made shaving only fractionally more treacherous. I also found that if I didn’t flick the switch on, the Gillette Mach3 Power Nitro functioned as a reasonably useful, if aesthetically grotesque, shaving instrument the equal of razors costing one-tenth its price.

Time passes [envision one of those calendars flipping though days and months that movies use to indicate the flight of time]. As is true of all things in this temporal sphere, the battery and its compartment fall prey to corruption and deterioration, setting up a conduction channel that neatly bypasses the on-off switch, which remained in the “off” position.

At 2 AM on the fateful day, vibrations (and not the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations) ensue.

It will not surprise the attentive reader to learn that a Gillette Mach3 Power Nitro razor resting in a specific position on a soap tray of the sort pictured below containing just the right amount of soap residue positioned in a resonant tile-lined shower produces a sound some say resembles running water.

But Wait, There’s Still More

Tomorrow.

[Continued in The Spooksound: Shake It Up Baby]

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